The F/A-18 Super Hornet Is About to Fly Farther Than Ever Before

America's F/A-18E/F Super Hornet fleet, the backbone of the Navy’s fighter force, is getting new fuel tanks, as you can see in the Boeing artist's depiction above. The tanks are designed to allow the plane to fly and fight farther than ever before. It's a move that is in large part driven by a desire to stop Chinese long-range missiles that could target aircraft carriers, destroying them before they can threaten American flat-tops.

On Feb 14, the U.S. Navy awarded a $219 million contract to Boeing for the “design, development, test and integration of the conformal fuel tank in support of the F/A-18”. The work will be done in El Segundo, CA, St. Louis, and Philadelphia. It is expected to be completed by 2022.

For more than half a century, fighter and attack planes carried fuel in bomb-shaped “drop tanks” suspended from wing and fuselage pylons. These provided an extra source of fuel for the aircraft, increasing flying distance. While the tanks made aircraft less agile and aerodynamic, they could be jettisoned like bombs in an emergency.

A more modern problem is that drop tanks increase an airplane’s radar signature. If a stealth plane wanted to use them, it would need to draw from the drop tanks first, while still out of the range of enemy radars, but drop them as soon as they got within detection range.

A relatively new advancement is the use of conformal fuel tanks, or CFTs, that are attached semi-permanently to an aircraft. The F-15E Strike Eagle, a variant of the F-15 fighter designed for fighter and long range strike missions, was the first to use conformal fuel tanks that cling to the fuselage on both sides of the engine air intakes. CFTs are more aerodynamic, and if you didn’t know the original F-15 did not have CFTs, you probably wouldn’t realize they weren’t part of the original design. Later versions of the F-16 Fighting Falcon also use CFTs.

In this photo, the F-15E’s conformal fuel tanks are visible as bulges between the air intake and the traditional drop tank.

U.S. Air Force photo by Staff Sgt. Michael Battles

The rise of China and Russia has pushed so-called “big power warfare” to the forefront of national security concerns. China in particular has so-called anti-ship ballistic missiles (ASBMs). These medium-range ballistic missiles, such as the DF-21 mobile missile, are designed to attack aircraft carriers. ASBMs like the DF-21D variant, because of their ballistic trajectory, fast reentry speed, and steep terminal descent angle, are difficult (but not impossible) to intercept. The DF-21D’s maximum range is about 1,100 miles. Until the Navy squares away new tactics to defend against DF-21Ds, that creates a 1,100 mile no-go zone around any location with a DF-21D, which includes pretty much all of the Chinese coastline.

In the meantime, the Navy needs a credible way to hold such ASBMs at risk using its number-one strike asset: carrier-based aircraft. The problem: the U.S. Navy’s F/A-18E/F Super Hornet fleet has a range of just over 500 miles, fully loaded with munitions to hunt ASBM launchers. That means to get the Hornets into the fight, the aircraft carrier, and all 5,000 people on board, must be in range of Chinese missiles.

The Navy realizes this is a problem and is working on two workarounds. The first is the use of CFTs, which according to this 2013 Aviation Week & Space Technology report could add nearly 300 miles of range to Super Hornets. The second is the development of the MQ-25 Stingray unmanned aerial vehicle, a dedicated aerial refueling platform. Together, along with standoff long-range weapons, the Navy’s strike fighters should still be able to destroy long distance targets while keeping their carriers away from danger.

Super Hornet CFTs were originally proposed in 2013, but according to the new contract should be ready for production in 2022. According to AvWeek, Boeing tested and flew an in-house design in 2013, so why it would take until 2022 to produce CFTs for this new contract is a bit of a mystery.

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